Learning Goal: Understand what characteristic properties are and how they can be used.

Opening Question: Think about someone in your family. How would describe them to another person? What are the properties that make them unique from other people?

The purpose of this question is to give students relatable examples of characteristic properties. However, it does have some drawbacks. For example, hair color will often be a property that students will list, however, hair color can change. When I'm teaching this, I work hard to push the students to characteristic properties like skin color, dimples, mouth shape, and so on.

Students record their opening question on their learning goal sheet and are ready to start class 3 min after the bell has rung. I reward students who get started early with ROCK STAR SCIENTIST tickets.

The Gold - How its made video used for today's hook is interesting but not totally aligned to the learning. I wanted to find a video that just explored the properties of gold, but instead, I found this video about how gold is extracted from the earth. I decided to use this video for two reasons:

1) It does contain a lot of information about gold and its properties.

2) It is a nice introduction to the purpose behind separation of mixtures.

However, I've found that you can't just show this video! You need to stop and comment at different times pointing out the characteristic properties of gold and the methods they are using to separate the gold from the ore.

At this point in the learning, I am ready for kids to read about characteristic properties. I like to start with real experiences so that they can bring their ideas into their reading. This reading today is Day 1 of a two day reading. This text is deceptively simple. It is only one page, but it is jammed with great information we can return to again and again.

For today's job the students will be reading silently and annotating. In my class, these skills are long established and students understand the norms, but I still get out my anchor chart to make sure that students remember how to be successful.

Resources

Once students have read the text the first time, I ask them to use our discussion starters to discuss the characteristic properties we have looked at in class, magnetism and solubility. I walk around the room, making sure that I hear students going back to the text to answer the questions. A great tool that teachers can use to monitor student discussions is Class dojo. This tool allows you to point out great thoughts students are having as well as keep the entire class on task.

The purpose of this section is to make sure students know how to create a Frayer Model. I choose to use a Frayer for the concept of CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY because it is a pivotal concept of this unit. Also, the students will be able to use the reading to pull ideas from for the definition and characteristics.

The purpose of this section is to make the Frayer model for Characteristic Property. There are a number of materials you can use to have students construct Frayers. One of my favorites is to hand out 3 x 5 note cards because these can easily be hung on the wall as a class display.

In this case though, I am having students make the Frayer in their lab notebooks, so that they will be able to access the work again and again.

This section can either completed as Independent work, Collaborative work, or Guided work. In this situation I choose Guided work because I wanted to make sure that students were pulling information from the article to use as part of their definition and characteristics. However, I did not "model" this for the kid; meaning I did not give the kids the definition and the characteristics, I expected them to find that information for themselves from the article.

Resources (1)

Resources

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Big Idea:
In this lesson, students learn about physical and chemical properties. Then, they observe and measure the physical properties of a mystery item. At the end, students describe the properties of their mystery matter while the class tries to guess what it is!